JACUMBA WAVES GOODBYE TO EYE GNATS

Organic farm blamed for infestation calls it quits for lack of water, and bugs fade away

JACUMBA 
Karen Jones can’t believe she doesn’t have to do the “Jacumba Wave” anymore.

That’s the quick-moving hand gesture in front of the face that was long a part of every Jacumba resident’s life, the move that shooed away, at least temporarily, the dozens of eye gnats that hoped to land for feeding on a moist facial area.

“Usually on a day like this, we’d be swatting them away like crazy,” said Jones, a 20-year resident of the rural community on the Mexico border.

Eye gnats have been part of the lives of Jacumbans for years, an issue that many say was exacerbated when an organic farm sat across from Jacumba’s little airport and adjacent to its downtown area. Bornt Farms, which opened in 1998, moved out July 1, saying lack of water had made it impossible to continue.

What will happen to the 1,200 acres it sat on is unknown.

There has been no word from the owners of the property, Jacumba Valley Ranch, about whom or what might move in, and when. No one from the company could be reached for comment despite emails, phone calls and visits to the ranch’s Mission Valley office.

Meanwhile, residents are happy to see fewer of the pesky bugs in Jacumba, a town of about 600 people near the Mexican border. Jones was at a park with her 5-year-old granddaughter, Jasmine, in late June, next to the community’s library, enjoying not having to use a battery-powered fan to keep the bugs away.

“We’d have to be careful opening our mouths,” Jones added. “It was miserable. We’d have to talk to each other with our hands over our mouths.”

Alan Bornt, who ran the farm, said eye gnats started showing up in 2004.

“It got really bad for a couple of years so we started implementing control procedures and changed our cultural practices to make it less desirable for them,” he said. “We thought we got them to a tolerable level.”

As an organic farm, which specialized in spinach and baby lettuce, the use of pesticides was a no-go.

“In my observation, they hid behind the organic label,” said Jacumba resident Bill Pape, spokesman for Jacumbans Against Gnats, a group that formed several years ago to put pressure on the county’s Department of Environmental Health to help rid the area of the insects.

Bornt, whose business is based in Imperial Valley, signed an eye gnat abatement plan with the county in December that described traps and barrier cloths the farm had to use. In June, he received a notice from the county that the measures he had put in place were inadequate. The county had been conducting weekly inspections of the farm and monitoring the traps.

From May 17 through the end of June, the county received nearly 100 eye gnat public nuisance complaints from Jacumba residents, although county spokesman Gig Conaughton said there hasn’t been an increase in the numbers of eye gnats captured in monitoring traps in the community.